Posts Tagged ‘bombing’

When the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad was destroyed (read more) with a car bomb on my Saturday work shift (Sept. 20, 2008), killing dozens, I had to scramble to find source material locating the hotel in the downtown government district.

Problem was, none of the maps I found matched what I was seeing in Google Maps satellite view! It turns out Pakistani cartographers have a convention to rotate the orientation of these map so their capital’s streets are horizontal and vertical rather than at ~30° off north. This might maximize scale to the printable area, but most of the maps didn’t even have a north arrow!

The BBC had a custom map up before The Washington Post, but at least ours is “north up”.